Determining the anatomy of business systems for a virtual enterprise

Virtual enterprises are commonly project oriented collaborations, and as observed in the building and film-making industries, a particular enterprise may only exist for one project. In these industries, the project group has traditionally been formed from a network of people or organizations that have worked together in the past, and have some common, generally tacit understandings of what work is to be done, and how they can do it together. These understandings of a variety of business processes are the basis of the virtual enterprise total business system. But for projects where people do not physically come together, those tacit understandings that form elements of a business system need to be formally enunciated. This paper discusses four generic elements of such a system: the physical, information, decision and knowledge components, and tools that provide a framework for consistently reaching a common understanding of a particular business process that is part of the total system. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.